[News] Writer Cristian Alarcón presents a performance about the gay conversion therapy he suffered as a child

[FNX Magokiler]

He, a man with a prodigious memory, who remembered events that occurred when he was three years old and still living in Chile, before going into exile with his parents in Argentina shortly after the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet began, had annulled his experiences from among the six and eight years old.

The journalist and writer Cristian Alarcón (La Unión, 1970), a celebrity among trans-Andean journalists for his work in the newspaper Página 12 and later in the Anfibia media, author of chronicle books such as When I die I want to be played cumbia . Vidas de pibes jetos (Norma, 2003), Si me querés, quereme transa (2010, Norma), Un mar de castles peronistas (Marea, 2013) and who won the prestigious Alfaguara award last year with The third paradise, now knows why that. And he addresses it in a very personal performance.

These are the testosterone injections that he suffered as a child, in the attempt of his parents - saddened by the attacks that their son suffered at school and fearful of the rejection at the time of anything that smacked of homosexuality - to convert that child delicate, that little prince, in a “macho” of “back and forth”.

Alarcón tells it all (or almost everything) in “Testosterona”. Just as he has done in his journalistic work, as when he immersed himself headlong, even putting his life at risk, in the drug world in Buenos Aires, now he puts “all the meat on the grill”, he puts it all on the line, in the performance directed by Lorena Vega and also starring Tomás de Jesús, which will have its world premiere within the framework of the upcoming Teatro a Mil festival.

 

 

It will be specifically at the Mori Theater in Recoleta, on Tuesday, January 16 and Wednesday, January 17, in the prelude to a tour that also includes his adopted country and other countries on the continent.

Here he tells how this story came to be.

-Had you done performance before?
-Since its inception, 6 or 7 years ago, I had coordinated the Anfibia Performative Journalism Laboratory, in which we experimented with crossing borders between journalism and the arts, creating from long and in-depth journalistic investigations on issues of contemporary agenda, performances that at the beginning were also street performances, installations, in short, had many ways of existing, but that became increasingly more scenic. The last three that we premiere are three stage performances and I believe that that is the experience that returns me not only to childhood and adolescence, which was part of my work a long time ago, is to move over the materials of memory, but also It brings me back to a very incipient relationship that I had with the theater in my very early youth, at 14, 15, 16 years old, in the south of Argentina, when I lived in Cipolletti.

There I participated for a long season in very strong, very strong physical training, with a teacher named Daniel Vitulich. Daniel Vitulich is the name that I chose as a pseudonym to apply for the Alfaguara award. He was my teacher, he had been a student of (Raúl) Serrano, in Buenos Aires.

 

https://www.elmostrador.cl/cultura/2023/12/28/escritor-cristian-alarcon-presenta-performance-sobre-la-terapia-de-conversion-gay-que-sufrio-de-nino/